Protection Against Active Eavesdropping.

Alemayehu Kebede A, Yi Zhou, Zheng Ma

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has shown significant advantages in improving physical layer security (PLS) performance. Due to simultaneous intercepting and jamming, active eavesdropping attacks can induce more serious security threats to RIS-enabled wireless communications. To deal with this attack, in this work, we propose a double-cooperative RIS-aided PLS framework for protecting against full-duplex active eavesdropping. To be more specific, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the secrecy capacity by optimizing the phase vectors of double RISs, with the consideration of inter-RIS beamforming gain. Next, to solve this non-convex problem, an efficient iterative algorithm is designed by applying semi-definite relaxation (SDR), successive convex approximation (SCA), and penalty-based solutions. The simulation results verify the superiority of our double-cooperative-RIS solution to prevail against full-duplex active eavesdropping.

Mahtab Mirmohseni, Panos Papadimitratos

Stefan Raß, Sandra König

Abstract—Quantum networks are communication networks in which adjacent nodes enjoy perfectly secure channels thanks to quantum key distribution (QKD). While QKD is renowned for perfect point-to-point security and its eavesdropping detec-tion capabilities, end-to-end security is nontrivial to achieve. More importantly, the eavesdropping detection can indeed be turned against the system itself. It is known that perfect end-to-end security can be created from point-to-point security by means of multipath transmission (in fact, there is no other way to do this, assuming no pre-shared secrets and avoiding public-key cryptography). However, multipath transmission requires node-disjoint paths, which in turn are to be assured by the underlying routing protocol. At this point, an active or passive adversary may intentionally eavesdrop on the QKD protocol to temporarily cut a channel and to cause key-buffers running empty and enforcing local rerouting of packets towards nodes under his control. Consequently, the multipath transmission channels might no longer be non-intersecting, thus defeating the overall security by exploiting QKD’s eavesdropping detec-tion facilities. Alternatively, an active adversary may as well insert bogus traff c to cause local congestion, thus even sparing the effort of eavesdropping on a QKD link. In this work, we use Markov chains to model a multipath transmission, and we discuss the extent to which secure multipath transmission is resilient against local congestions caused by an adversary. We argue that a protection against an active adversary who uses bogus traff c to f ddle with the routing, calls for additional security measures, perhaps even beyond the capabilities of QKD or multipath transmission. It turns out that robustness against passive and active adversaries can be retained as long as no bogus traff c is observed.

Nguyễn Văn Huynh, Nguyen Quang Hieu, Nam H. Chu +3 more

Unlike conventional anti-eavesdropping methods that always require additional energy or computing resources (e.g., in friendly jamming and cryptography-based solutions), this work proposes a novel anti-eavesdropping solution that comes with mostly no extra power nor computing resource requirement. This is achieved by leveraging the ambient backscatter technology in which secret information can be transmitted by backscattering it over ambient radio signals. Specifically, the original message at the transmitter is first encoded into two parts: (i) active transmit message and (ii) backscatter message. The active transmit message is then transmitted by using the conventional wireless transmission method while the backscatter message is transmitted by backscattering it on the active transmit signals via an ambient backscatter tag. As the backscatter tag does not generate any active RF signals, it is intractable for the eavesdropper to detect the backscatter message. Therefore, secret information, e.g., a secret key for decryption, can be carried by the backscattered message, making the adversary unable to decode the original message. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution can significantly enhance security protection for communication systems.